Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 might make its way to Chromebooks

Samsung Chromebook Pro
Samsung Chromebook Pro (Image credit: Android Central)

Qualcomm officially took the wraps off its Snapdragon 845 processor on December 6, and in case you haven't heard yet, there's a lot to be excited about.. The 845 has big improvements in performance, camera quality, and data speeds on phones, and overall, it's a big step up from the already great 835.

Alongside the 845, Qualcomm also announced "Always Connected PCs." Always Connected PCs are Windows laptops that are powered by the Snapdragon 835, but according to new commits found in the Chromium Gerrit, we could see the newer 845 make its way to Chrome OS.

The 845 and Chrome OS could result in unrivaled performance and battery.

According to the folks at XDA Developers, there are a few different commits that hint at this. One of them is a board that's referred to as "cheza", and another commit that follows this reveals that "cheza" is the board overlay used on a Snapdragon 845 reference device.

This would be the first time a Qualcomm processor makes its way into a Chromebook, and that's exciting for a few reasons. The two Always Connected PCs (the HP Envy x2 and Asus NovaGo) have already shown that the 835 is plenty powerful for driving Windows 10, and the use of the 835 allows for gigabit LTE data connections and battery life that's said to last four times longer than modern smartphones. Now, imagine what kind of performance and battery life we could see with a more powerful processor (the 845) running on a lighter desktop operating system (Chrome OS).

It's unclear when exactly we could start seeing Chromebooks powered by the Snapdragon 845, but even so, it's exciting enough to know that something like this might be in the works.

Top 5 reasons to be excited for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845

Joe Maring

Joe Maring was a Senior Editor for Android Central between 2017 and 2021. You can reach him on Twitter at @JoeMaring1.